The Pen That Draws in the Air

It is, literally, a pen that lets you draw in the air. Called 3Doodler and the invention of WobbleWorks co-founder Maxwell Bogue, the $99 pen lets users build physical objects out of hot plastic.

The magic, said Mr. Bogue, a speaker at the London Le Web conference, is in heating up the plastic (either conventional ABS plastic, or the more eco-friendly PLA), extruding it from the nib of the pen, and then immediately cooling it to form a fine structure.

The project was crowdfunded and, according to Mr. Bogue, one of Kickstarter’s most successful fundings. “We asked for $30,000, we ended up with $2.3 million,” he said.

Anyone who has used a hot-glue gun will find it pretty similar, except, as you lift the pen up, you can build objects in the air, rather than just working on a flat surface. Or you can build flat objects, using stencils for example, and then weld them together. That was how Mr. Bogue created a 2-foot Eiffel Tower. “That took seven hours to build,” he said.

Like so many inventions, 3Doodler started life after a mistake. One day, Mr. Bogue said, co-founder Peter Dilworth was using a 3-D printer and it made a mistake leaving a hole. “He said ‘I wish I could pick up the [printer] head and fill it in.’”

“The next day we both took apart one of our 3-D printers to find out how they work. That was where the idea came from.”

Originally envisaged for use by home hobbyists or as a toy — Mr. Brogue has a background in toy design — following the successful Kickstarter project, lots of new applications have come forth, including graphing work for sight-impaired users.

“People who are sight-impaired can use special paper for drawing graphs that has a raised grid on it so they can plot graphs. But of course once they have drawn a line that is flat, they have no way of knowing if the line is right,” he said.

The pen Mr. Brogue used for his demonstration is a preproduction model; the one that will start to ship to Kickstarter backers later this year and go on sale to the public probably next year is rather slicker. He is also planning a child’s version that uses plastic with a much lower melting point (45 degrees Celsius, rather than around 200 degrees Celsius), as well as professional tools.

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